Title: Stemming the tide of social media manipulation – Techniques, challenges and complications

Abstract:

Bio:

Speaker: Gianluca Stringhini, Boston University

Title: Computational Methods to Understand and Mitigate Online Hate

Abstract:Online hate on social media is becoming a serious problem. Aggression is often not the act of single individuals,
but rather the result of coordinated activity between like minded people who gather on polarized online communities, identify suitable
targets, and carry out their attacks. Studying this phenomenon is hard, in part because it is not a purely technical problem, in part
because this malicious activity unfolds across multiple online services, and the research community currently lacks effective tools to keep
track of information that is not contained to a single platform. In this talk, I will present our research on studying the modus operandi of
attackers that orchestrate and execute coordinated hate attacks on social media, which we call “raids.” I will show that online polarized
communities such as 4chan’s politically incorrect board are particularly effective in performing this type of attack, often causing great
psychological harm to their victims, and that it is possible to identify raids by looking at coordinated activity happening on different
platforms (e.g., a thread on 4chan and the comments on a YouTube video). Finally, I will discuss potential countermeasures against this phenomenon.

Bio:

Speaker: Barry Bradlyn (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Title: TBD

Abstract: TBD

Bio:

Speaker:Tyler Otto

Title: Content Security at Reddit

Abstract:Reddit’s moderation and governance model is unique within the internet landscape. In addition to its sitewide policies and
enforcement, Reddit has cultivated a community-driven ecosystem that empowers users to work with volunteer community moderators and internal
company admins to help curate quality content and reduce the exposure of rule-breaking content and ensure the content is fitting with community
standards. Increasingly, Reddit is using data science to aggregate and enrich these signals, allowing us to catch issues that would be more
challenging for an individual to notice. This investment in data science has drastically improved the speed and efficacy with which Reddit is
able to respond to threats. By better leveraging analytics, Reddit has been able to increase the percentage of content that is taken down
proactively from 27% in 2017 to around 99%.

Bio:Tyler Otto is the Director of Threat Analytics at Reddit. His team leverages data science for the detection and
mitigation of scaled threats targeting Reddit. This includes things like spam, vote manipulation, site integrity, and malicious bots.
Additionally, his team builds models to help improve traditional operations teams be more effective and efficient. Prior to running threat
analytics at Reddit, Tyler lead the product Data Science team at Reddit. Before Reddit, he was the Head of Data Science at Hipmunk, a
travel startup that was acquired by Concur.

ENCASE is funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchanges Action, Grant Agreement No. 691025.

This project supports the efforts of the Research Executive Agency (REA) for Open Access to scientific results. ENCASE openly links its publications, software, datasets and other artifacts with its project information as required by REA.

Project’s results

The results of the ENCASE project are published by the European Commission.